


what we deserve and what we get

by The-Immortal-Moon (LunaKat)



Series: What We Are (FMA Angst Week 2018) [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst and Feels, F/M, FMA Angst Week 2018, Gen, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 08:55:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15482217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/The-Immortal-Moon
Summary: For FMA angst week 2018. Day 1: PenanceFor repentance to come, one must first suffer.





	what we deserve and what we get

**Author's Note:**

> **Penance**  
>  (noun)  
> \--voluntary self-punishment inflicted as an outward expression of repentance for having done wrong.

Every day, there is at least one voice in Hohenheim’s head that whispers, _You don’t deserve this._

Trisha tries to assure him otherwise. She is one voice against thousands, but hers is particularly loud in comparison. “You can’t punish yourself forever,” she insists. Her eyes shimmer up at him, green as the fertile hills of Risembool, green like summers in which golden sunlight streams through leaf-filled trees, green like life. “I can’t imagine how much you’ve suffered, I honestly can’t. But I don’t want to see you suffer anymore.”

She doesn’t know everything—the basics, mostly, that he was once a slave and that he lost his home and as a result he is hundreds of years old. He hasn’t told her about the voices, the hundreds of thousands of souls besides his own. He hasn’t told her about the Philosopher’s Stone and all that it is, because he knows that the moment he does, she will recoil from him as though burned. And perhaps he is a selfish wretch of man, because the idea of such a thing transpiring threatens to break him to pieces.

 _I don’t deserve you_ , he thinks. Voices murmur agreement, bubble in the back of his skull, lingering resentment and anger that can never be forgotten, _No, you don’t._

Even though her smiles are brilliant, even though her eyes are bright and she looks genuinely, achingly _happy_ when she is with him—he knows she would be much better off without him.

“Don’t think that,” she says, smacking his shoulder lightly. She is a vision lying in bed beside him, her hair unbound and spilling in a chocolate cascade around her shoulders. Her skin is alabaster, pearlescent in the moonlight. He can see the subtle lines of her veins, a phantasmal blue, running beneath the fragility of her mortal flesh. “Don’t you dare.”

He never tells her his thoughts, but she knows, somehow. _A woman’s intuition_ , jokes Cornelia, but he thinks it has to be something more profound than that.

“I know you.” Her breath is soft and warm against his shoulder. Her hands trace his chest, his jaw, taper through his hair. “You look at me like I’m something fragile, like I’ll break or something. And I won’t.”

“You _are_ fragile,” he insists. The human body is an extraordinary masterpiece, but it is delicate and highly complex. The slightest of imbalances can cause it to collapse. Too little blood. Too little water, too little food, too much heat, too much cold. Too much or too little of anything, and all those complex systems completely unravel, fall apart, and those humans die. In fact, early on, humans were only meant to live a few decades—once they grow older than forty, their bodies start to degrade.

He can feel her smile against his collarbone, and the flutter of her lashes tickles his skin. “Not as much as you think.”

Edward and Alphonse are much more fragile than she is. Babies are born with skulls that are flexible and not yet hard, a “soft spot” that gradually closes as they age and grow. They have no immune system and are not inured to illnesses the way adults are. The smallness of their soft, fleshy bodies frightens him—if he holds them too tight, he might crush them, but too loosely and they might slip free from his grasp.

They have wide eyes that peer up at him without any hesitation, not green like hers but yellow like his, golden as the endless dunes of the arid desert. They look so much like him. It hurts in a way he didn’t think it could—pain that is somehow glorious and exquisite and laced so heavily with love he wants to weep.

 _I don’t deserve this_ , he thinks, over and over, every night.

And always, always, there is at least one soul that agrees.

“They’re yours,” Trisha insists. She touches him without hesitation, without fear. Her eyes have their own width and innocent sparkle to them. She really is a child in comparison to him—it is selfish of him to care for her so much, to make her love him so deeply. “You have a right to them. To hold them and love them. Don’t you even  _think_ otherwise.”

She is unfailingly optimistic, and he does not deserve her. Not after everything he lost, not after everything he allowed to transpire. Not when he cannot bring solace to himself or any of his wrongfully-condemned passengers. It was his monstrous blood that birthed the Homunculus. Who knows what it will do to her, or to them.

He pulls away for her from stretches of time, with no outward explanation for it. It causes hurt and sympathy to flicker in her emerald eyes, but then she smiles gently, gracefully. Patiently, she waits—and she does not deserve that, either. She is not the one who should bare punishment and pain, not for his mistakes.

“It doesn’t _matter_ what happened in the past.” She is insistent sometimes, growing vaguely exasperated, but nothing beyond that. He doesn’t understand how she can weather it all so silently, so resolutely. Why she doesn’t just yell and scream and let her emotions loose. He deserves screaming and shouting and verbal punishment for all his wrongs. “It’s alright to hurt, but if you let it rule your present, you’ll lose what you have.”

Maybe so. But what he has is so _finite_.

The pain on her face is on his account. She truly is a martyr in her own right, suffering for her cause—but it’s pointless. He cannot be redeemed, no matter how much she tries to convince him otherwise. He wishes she would surrender, just so he wouldn’t have to see her pain.

Edward toddles over to them, and Trisha smiles brightly, like the first light of dawn, as she scoops him up. Two sets of eyes peer at him, green and gold, the former with a knowing glint in her eyes. “That’s how you know something is important. If it hurts to lose it, that means you love it.”

She passes Edward over to him, and Hohenheim _knows_ she is trying to make him understand, to remember that he has two sons here who need a father—a better father than him, granted. But he can’t do it. It only reminds him how unfamiliar, how foreign, it is for him to hold another person in his arms. He sets Edward down. The child immediately scampers off somewhere else, untroubled by the exchange and clearly thinking nothing of it.

“That doesn’t mean it’s warranted,” he says, watching Edward go. _It’s not, it’s not, it’s not_ , comes the incessant murmur.

A small sigh leaves her and she presses a fleeting kiss to his cheek. “Warranted or not, you can still treasure it.”

If only he could. For repentance to come, one must first suffer.

“I have to go,” he tells her. It’s not just because he can’t bear to watch her grow old and die while he remains painfully stagnant. That’s a large part of it, but it’s also the Homunculus, and history repeating, and knowing that he can stop it. That he _should_ stop it.

It pains her. She doesn’t fully understand—she knows he’s searching for mortality, not about the Homunculus—but she accepts his decision regardless. He tries to tell her about the danger the country faces, the specter of death and destruction he suspects to be hovering over Amestris, but even as he says it, it feels like an excuse.

“So you’re going off to save the world, hm?” The amusement shows in her smile, in the twinkle of her eyes. He can’t help compare them to the stars, to the infinite spiral of the cosmos in the night sky. There’s also sadness there, slow and resigned. Here or not, he is always hurting her. How tragic they are. “Alright, silly man. Just promise to come back.”

“Of course,” he says, but the words break in his throat. He doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve her, or the boys, or any component of this beautiful, peaceful life.

_You don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve this._

And so he runs, because an idyll like this is so far beneath him that he cannot bear to stain it with his blood-drenched presence. Everything he touches crumbles like ash. It’s too late for him. Maybe, though, he can spare them the pain.

Every moment away from them is torture—but it is just what he deserves.

**Author's Note:**

> Can you tell how much I love these characters?


End file.
